Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Thursday and I slept in rather late this morning as I was up really late last night.

It was a busy day today and I actually managed to forget to eat all day yesterday!  By the end of the day I had gone to bed forgetting about food entirely.  Need to eat tonight for sure.

Yesterday, late at night, I sent in a feature request to Amazon for the Echo that I would like to have control of the lights on it to use it as a night light.  They responded already this morning about how much they liked the idea and were passing it on to see what could be done with that.

We had a major downpour today.  It was really nice.  I’m enjoying the rain now that we are back in Texas.  Apparently rain in the rain forest where we were living this summer is less common than the name would suggest.

Luciana fell asleep, all on her own, a little after seven thirty this evening!  Talk about a quiet evening for us.  Normally she is up much later, at least now that we are here in Texas.

After she was asleep, Liesl asked for Panda Express.  So I ran out and picked up an order to go.  Liesl loves their Chow Main, it is one of her favourite meals.  Dominica and I got the shrimp, of course.

We watched Modern Family before going to bed.  We are really liking that show.

Today was a heavy work day.  I did sleep in just a little as I had insomnia last night and ended up working from the bedroom all day.  I really never came out.  It was a quiet day.  The girls, outside of doing school, spent the day playing well together in their room and Dominica appreciated having a quiet day to herself downstairs.

I got a fair amount done today, one of the really big things being a ton of catchup on SGL which no one will see for a really long time because I need to backtrack and fill in some days from almost a month ago before I can start posting the days that I have already written up.  But it is good progress that I can really see.  Hopefully soon and long before we leave to return to Central America.

Dominica got a ton of the school prep work done for the trip.  That needed to be done and she is much better prepared than before.  She has been scanning books continuously for two days!

I worked late into the night.  The girls managed to stay up until around one in the morning before we noticed that they were still awake.  They are going to be tired tomorrow.

Today is Tuesday but the first day of work this week as yesterday was Labor Day and a holiday.  It was a bit rough getting back into the swing of normal work.  I worked all last week but that was rather different from normal.  For normal work it has been nearly two weeks!  I worked late on the Wednesday before we left Panama, we had no Internet on Thursday, Friday we traveled and it was a holiday yesterday.  So about one day short of two weeks!

After work this evening Dominica and I watched some of Modern Family at the kitchen table while we ate dinner, salads, and then we took the laptop upstairs and the girls piled into our bed and we watched it until it was time to go to bed.  It was a really nice evening of family snuggle time.

The Grices did not come over today.  We all took today as a relaxing holiday.  We did very little.  It was great having a day with nothing that we needed to do.

This afternoon I saw someone post something about Red Lobster on Facebook and I decided that we had not been there in quite some time. I asked Dominica and she asked the girls and they were very excited to get to go out to Red Lobster for dinner.  Liesl says that Red Lobster is her favourite restaurant!

It was latish when we went out to the Red Lobster on Bay Area Boulevard.  Thankfully it is really close for us so going to one is really no effort at all.  Since it was dinner time on Labour Day it was not busy at all.  There were lots of empty tables and we were seated immediately.

Luciana, surprisingly, decided that she did not want calamari tonight and instead just got mac and cheese, which she did a good job eating.  Liesl got popcorn shrimp and devoured them.  Dominica and I went for creating our own meals.  We have gotten better at ordering when at Red Lobster and avoided an appetizer, dessert and getting massive meals.  We are always so full and waste so much food.  I got the coconut shrimp which I love and the stuffed flounder.  The girls are so excited to get the cheesy biscuits.

After dinner we came home and snuggled in the bed in our room watching Modern Family until it was time to go to sleep.

It is the middle of the three day Labor Day weekend and today is the pool day for the Miller and Grice kids.  I did not get very good sleep last night as Liesl came into our bed having had a “bad night.”  We don’t know what she meant and she did not seem to want to elaborate.  Something about being scared and crying but she was not clear if she had had a bad dream or what.  So she climbed into our bed, which is not a king, which meant that there was not enough room for me to do my necessarily turning or to keep myself cool so I was overheated and my back hurt and I basically never fell asleep.  So only an hour or two of sleep all night for me.

The Grices came over on the early side this morning and Dominica and Francesca went out shopping for a few hours while I sat outside and watched the four little kids in the pool.  It was a really hot day and pretty much I could do nothing but sit and try not to pass out in a chair.  There was no breeze at all so even though it was only in the mid nineties it was too hot to do anything at all.  The humidity was really high too.

Liesl is getting better and better at swimming now.  This was her first time, I think, alone in the pool with her cousins without her floaties and she did really well.  She did not need anyone to help her all day and they swam for a really long time.  She was jumping in and playing and swimming the whole time.  She has gone from unable to swim to full swimming so quickly!

We did not do much today other than the swimming.  The cousins stayed at the Tocco house until late afternoon and then went home so that everyone would have a chance to get some rest.

This evening we decided to just stay in.  We had been planning on getting Subway for dinner, because I had promised Liesl that we would, but she wanted left over Chow Mein for dinner and that worked out well for us as Dominica and I were happy to just have some salad that we had available.

Dominica and I watched a bit of Modern Family this evening.  Liesl has a fever and is not feeling so well so she climbed into bed and just watched the show with us.  Luciana decided that she wanted to take a bath.

Luciana forgot to turn off the bath water and discovered that there was a leak in the overflow of the tub.  Suddenly we heard Brittany downstairs yelling that water was coming through the ceiling.  We ran into the bathroom but Luciana had not spilled any water, everything was fine in there.  But it was spilling inside the wall from the overflow of the tub.  A lot of water was in the wall.

So that made for a very dramatic evening.